Nils J. Nilsson, The Quest for Artificial Intelligence, Cambridge, 2010.

摘要

I admit I was flattered when Nils Nilsson wrote in Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis (1998) that he was not including historical remarks "because the longer text by [Russell and Norvig 1995] had already done such a thorough job in that regard." But I was also more than a bit disappointed; I wanted to see what Nilsson had to say about the history of AI. Sure, we've had good histories of the field, such as those by McCorduck (1981), Haugeland (1985), Crevier (1994) and Boden (1996). But it has been about 15 years since the last major history, and a lot has happened. And Nilsson has a unique viewpoint: he has been a key early AI researcher, an influential lab leader, a AAAI president, author of three very different AI textbooks, and a teacher and department chair at a leading AI department. Furthermore, he has the disposition of a careful scholar and is not inclined to push just one viewpoint. From the beginning, his work has spanned the logical and probabilistic approaches to AI-he could give a more balanced overview than someone who has worked in only one of these camps. I wanted to hear his take on the history of AI.